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It Only Gets Better With Age: 7 Wine Storage Basics to Keep in Mind
As your appreciation of fine wines grows with knowledge and experience you will no doubt want to ensure that you get the best drinking experience each time you uncork a bottle, and the best way to do that is to understand some essential wine storage basics.
Investing in the best built-in wine cooler for your collection would be a good starting point, and there are some other storage tips that are well worth knowing too.
Focus on temperature
You will already know what a difference it makes to the taste of your wine if it is stored and served at the right temperature.
You need to appreciate the fact that the majority of wines in your collection will react to temperature and they often age quicker when exposed to extremes of heat or cold.
Aim to store your wines between 10C and 15C, and make sure it stays constant.
Light can spoil your wine
Exposing your bottles to direct sunlight or unnatural light sources tends to cause a reaction with the phenolic compounds in the wine, so think about this when sitting your wine collection.
A quiet place to rest
One aspect of wine storage that can often get overlooked is the damage that can be done by sounds and vibration.
Sounds have the capacity to stir the sediments and this can adversely affect the taste of your wine, making it too sweet, or too acidic, for instance.
Think about humidity
A key priority with regard to keeping your wines in perfect condition is to make sure that the cork doesn’t get the opportunity to dry out.
What happens when the cork dries out is your wine is then exposed to oxygen and that is not good news.
Optimal conditions when it comes to humidity is maintaining a range of between 50% and 70%. This is where a wine cooler and temperature-controlled environment can really help.
All fridges are not equal
On the subject of refrigeration, be mindful that your regular refrigerator is not designed or equipped to deliver long-term wine storage solutions.
There is every chance that your wine can freeze when subjected to standard fridge temperatures for too long.
Horizontal is best
If you are using traditional corked bottles they prefer to be stored horizontally in order to prevent a problem with moisture and oxygen entering the bottle.
Once you open a bottle
You may be tempted to open a bottle of your favorite wine to have one glass before sealing it again for future use, which is fine as long as you know how to store it again properly.
The first thing to say is that you should aim to be very selective about how many bottles you open as it is not ideal, Having said that, as long as you use a vacuum pump to remove the air from inside and cover the cork with wax paper or replace it with a rubber stopper, it should maintain its attributes.
Becoming a connoisseur of wines takes years of experience but learning the basics of wine storage can help you enjoy them as you learn.
